


The Family Business

by thewightknight



Series: Ridiculous Crossovers Nobody Asked For [20]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015), Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, Family History, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24111169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewightknight/pseuds/thewightknight
Summary: “That’s my great grandmother,” Bobby said, pointing to the regal woman sitting in the high-backed chair in the middle. “Edith. And next to her’s my gramma, Enola.” Enola stood to her mother’s right, a hand on the back of the chair. “My mom. Eunice.” That was the young lady sitting on the floor in front of the chair. “Grandpa Joseph. Buncha cousins I can’t remember the name of. But it’s those three. My great, my gran and my ma. They’re the ones that ran it all.”“The family business, huh?” Sam asked.
Relationships: Bobby Singer & Sam Winchester
Series: Ridiculous Crossovers Nobody Asked For [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1214289
Kudos: 29





	The Family Business

**Author's Note:**

> When I walked out of the theater after seeing Crimson Peak for the first time, it was with the thought that Edith Cushing had to have been Bobby Singer's great grandmother.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Sam said as they settled at Bobby’s dining room table with an assortment of winces and groans.

“I have. My great grandmother faced off against one of those. ‘Bout a hundred years ago.” Bobby glanced at the calendar and swore. “Shit. Exactly one hundred years ago, if I remember right. Need her journals.”

“Great. Where are they?”

“The attic.”

There wasn’t much in Bobby’s attic. A few broken pieces of furniture were piled in one corner, and there were a few stacks of boxes, but nothing else. Those boxes were Bobby’s goal. He started at the top, lifting the lid, shaking his head, closing it, and handing it to either Sam or Dean to move.

He found what he was looking for at the bottom of the second stack.

“Here we go.” Setting it on top of a rickety old table, he pushed aside a stack of envelopes and pulled out a stack of leather-bound books. A couple of photos slid out of one of the envelope and Bobby shoved them back in, but not before Sam caught a glance of a couple in Victorian clothing standing in front of a huge house.

Bobby plopped the journals down on the table, causing it to shake.

“There’s a lot of regular stuff in here. Old dame wrote down everything at first. Later, she kept more to the supernatural stuff.”

Curious, Sam opened one of the journals, flipping through it. Every page was filled with an elegant cursive handwriting. Occasional sketches were interspersed with the writing. It started normally enough, but the drawings became more obscure, more occult-themed, as the book progressed. Flipping back to the first page, he read the first sentence out loud. “Ghosts are real. This much I know. There are things that tied them to a place, very much like they do to us.”

“That’s her first one,” Bobby said. “It wouldn’t be in there. Dates are written inside the front covers. Look for the one from 1917.”

There were ten of the books, so it was a short search.

“C’mon. Let’s take this downstairs,” Bobby said.

“What about the rest of it?” Sam asked.

“Can look at the other journals later. Rest’s not important.”

They ended up bringing all the journals downstairs, but left the rest of the contents of the box undisturbed. It wasn’t until several months later that Sam remembered them envelopes and pictures they had contained and went back to look.

He ended up bringing the box downstairs, since the whole of the attic was lit by only a single bulb. Setting it down on Bobby’s kitchen table, he removed the contents, laying the envelopes out in front of him. They were dated and he organized them, from oldest to new. Some contained documents and newspaper clippings and he set those aside for later. It was the photographs that interested him. He chose an envelope at random and picked it up, letting the photos slide out on to the table. There was one that seemed to show an entire family, and he pulled this out from the others, holding it up to the light.

“Whatcha got there?” Bobby asked, surprising him. He had thought he was the only one awake. “Oh,” Bobby said, when he saw the picture Sam held. Grabbing a beer from the fridge, he sat down next to Sam.

“That’s my great grandmother,” Bobby said, pointing to the regal woman sitting in the high-backed chair in the middle. “Edith. And next to her’s my gramma, Enola.” Enola stood to her mother’s right, a hand on the back of the chair. “My mom. Eunice.” That was the young lady sitting on the floor in front of the chair. “Grandpa Joseph. Buncha cousins I can’t remember the name of. But it’s those three. My great, my gran and my ma. They’re the ones that ran it all.”

“The family business, huh?” Sam asked.

“Yeah.”

They went through the rest of the pictures. He picked out Edith in the oldest ones. She looked young, and almost frail, in them, until you looked at her eyes. Those eyes had a look in them—one Sam recognized. He saw it in the mirror. Those were the eyes of a person who’d seen things they’d rather not have seen.

There was the picture that had caught his eye when they first found the box, of her standing on the front steps of a huge house, with a man by her side.

“That’s her husband. He was a doctor. Came in handy when folks got banged up, dealing with things.”

“That’s a lot of house there. Were they rich?”

Bobby shrugged. “Yeah, they had a bit.”

“What happened to it all?”

“There was this little thing called the Great Depression. Ever heard of it?

Another envelope, the smallest one, had several more recent pictures. Polaroids, mostly, but a few faded color prints as well.

“Aw, hells,” Bobby said as Sam chuckled over a picture of a chubby baby in a white frilly outfit. “We don’t need to be lookin’ at that.” He grabbed for it, and Sam snatched it out of the way. Turning it over, he read the writing on the back. “Robert Thomas Singer, age six months. You were a pretty cute baby. What happened?”

“I’ll show you what happened,” Bobby growled, taking a swig of his beer.

Sam put the pictures back in the envelope and picked up the news article. The edges where it had been cut out of the paper were worn and it was falling apart at the folds. **_Gruesome Murders at Crimson Peak_** , the headline proclaimed.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Oh, that. Edith’s first husband was a piece of work. Him and his sister were going around Europe. They’d pick out lonely rich women, and he’d marry them for their money, then bring them back to his estate in England and murder them. Grandmother Edith could see their ghosts, and they warned her.”

“Guess that talent didn’t get passed along, or you would have said something.”

“Yeah, my grandmother had it too, but not my mom, and not me. Kinda glad of that. From the stories they told, the ghosts weren’t pretty.”

“Huh,” Sam said as he continued to read the article. One thing jumped out at him. _Sir Thomas Sharpe._ “Why’d they name you after him, then?” he asked.

“What?” Bobby asked. Sam pointed to the line in the article and he squinted at it, then grunted. “Weird. Never read the whole thing. I guess we’ll never know.”

“So this is how they got into all this? Seeing ghosts, and maybe looking around for other things.”

“Yep.”

As they gathered everything back into the box, Sam felt a bit envious of Bobby. Neither he nor Dean had anything like this. No family photos or news clippings or anything besides their dad’s journal. In the few brief moments he’d spent flipping through Enola’s, he could see they were filled with anecdotes of daily life as well as records of the things they hunted. There was a history in this box that he would never have.

Maybe that’s why he bought a blank journal a few days later, and started writing in it over the weekend. Who knows if he’d ever have children, with the way things were with their lives, but there’d be someone to come after him. Another hunter who’d pick up the reins when he and Dean got too old for this. Not that that seemed likely. The way things went, neither of them would make it to forty. But leaving something for them, whoever they would be, was a nice thought.

 _There are strange things out there,_ he wrote on the first page, _and every time I think I’ve seen it all, we find a new one._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to say hi, [check out my profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewightknight/profile) for where I’m currently hanging out on this here internet thing. If you liked this, please share! Kudos are love and comments are always appreciated.


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